Math anxiety negatively predicts young children's math achievement. While some researchers have suggested that math anxiety may stem from poor math ability, others have argued that math anxiety occurs at all levels of math ability. An important question is whether math anxiety predicts math achievement over and above foundational math skills. We…

Two studies were conducted to investigate effects of domain knowledge on metacognitive monitoring across the life span in materials of different complexity. Participants from 4 age groups (3rd-grade children, adolescents, younger and older adults) were compared using an expert-novice paradigm. In Study 1, soccer experts' and novices'…

Two studies examined children's map construction skills when drawing demands were removed from the task and scenes were highly simplified. Study 1 compared the performance of first graders and third graders on their ability to preserve configuration during transformation of pictured arrays from eye-level to aerial views. For children with…

Incongruity between a positive statement and a negative context is a cue to verbal irony. Two studies examined whether school-age children and adults recognized that listeners require knowledge of context to detect irony. Specifically, the studies investigated whether participants could inhibit their own context knowledge to appropriately gauge…

The present study examined whether younger and older children differ in the use of the goal-related information in a continuous performance task (AX-CPT), and if so, whether those age differences are due to the ability to represent and/or maintain goal information. Experiment 1 compared third- and sixth-grade children in their ability to transform…